EVENTS

The ‘Grand Bargain’ hoax

If the debt ceiling is raised and the government is opened, get ready for more talk of the need for a ‘Grand Bargain’ to cut spending on earned benefits (I refuse to call them by the common but misleading name of entitlements) and other programs that benefit the less well-off in order to rescue the country from the pending disaster caused by runaway debt.

But all that talk is a fraud.

Animator Mark Fiore uses information from PRWatch to expose all the lies behind these frantic appeals and reveal the wealthy people who are behind this campaign.

Comments

There is no immediate debt problem. It’s uncomfortably high and will have to be dealt with someday but it isn’t an emergency. Most of it was incurred by Reagan and Bush anyway. They were good at spending but not taxing.

And it isn’t due to Social Security and Medicare.

1. Both of these are self funded by taxes. You pay into them for seems like forever and take payments when you are old.

2. Social Security is solvent until 2033. Medicare is solvent until 2024. Both of these are good programs and wildly popular. If the GOP wants to take away Medicare, I don’t have a problem with that. An army of old people armed with canes and walkers would solve our Theothuglican problem in a heartbeat.

2033 and 2024 are infinity in political terms. We do need to tweak these programs occasionally and the earlier the better to keep them on track and everyone knows it. This also wouldn’t be a big deal if we had a functioning government. We don’t.

If these people were serious about the deficit, they would favor slashing defense spending (to, say less than 10% of its current level, i.e: what China spends, or less) the US is being played for a sucker by its military/defense sector. Anyone who does not immediately see that has not actually thought about the problem.

1. Arrest, charge, convict and imprison George Bush. It was his tax cuts and unpaid for wars that produced the current ballooning debt.

He probably hasn’t done anything strictly illegal but considering the amount of damage, so what? Do it on general principles for the good of our economy.

2. Paul Krugman says the economy should be growing 3% of year, not great but not bad. It’s at 2% and probably dropping thanks to the current Tea Party Temper Tantrum. He claims the GOP has cut 1% off of the GDP growth.

They have prevented a lot of potential economic and job creating policies from being enacted. The government is mostly inactive at doing anything constructive these days.

3. We do need to pursue economic growth and job creation. Obama has done that as much as possible which wasn’t much. It still worked. The deficit is half what it was a few years ago, going down, and tax receipts this year were 13% higher than the year before.

Economic growth can and will fix a lot of problems. All the GOP has done is get in the way and try to supervise every vagina and uterus in the USA which does nothing for the economy but irritate a lot of women.

4. They would stop trying to destroy the USA. These crisises are doing real financial damage to the USA. We won’t know for a while how much, a lot or a little. If the USA has to raise interest rates because everyone is afraid to hold US Treasuries, our borrowing costs go up, potentially a lot.

5. BTW, right now our debt is no big deal. Interest is $220 billion a year. This is 6% of our budget and we can handle that easily. But it won’t stay low forever and if interest rates rise, it is going to be a large share of our budget. It’s not an emergency at all but it is something to keep a close eye on.

Don’t worry. We’ve seen this play several times already. The Democrats will offer modest Social Security and Medicare cuts in exchange for slightly higher taxes on the rich (closing some loopholes, higher rates on capital, etc.). The Republicans will reject any tax increases out of hand. Therefore, no grand bargain, and no cuts to earned benefits. I think the only decent, achievable outcome is to keep funding at sequester levels but to implement the cuts in a more sensible manner. Even this may be too much to ask. The most likely scenario might be continuing resolutions with the full sequester until, and possibly even after, the 2014 midterm elections.

The Federal Government has been using Social Security revenue to fund current operations for decades. “Reform” constitutes a default on the retirement programs the bottom 99% have funded with a larger portion of their income through the regressive payroll tax.

The Government is being run the way corporations are, in that retirement liabilities owed to those who have pre-funded them are being discharged in bankruptcies.

The State of Illinois has been using the retirement deductions as general revenue for decades and now wants to do “Pension Reform” when not one penny of the shortfall was due to lack of contributions by the teachers who will be have had their retirement saving retroactively converted to a tax by any “reform” that reduces the benefits they paid for up front.

This is class warfare, for those who will dare to recognize it for what it is.